The Alienist

“And what was that, pray tell?” I asked, still not satisfied with his attitude.

Before he could answer the bodies of the two thugs came flying out the door of the tenement, hitting the snowy pavement hard. Their bowlers followed. The men were unconscious, and in a general condition that made Mr. Santorelli look a picture of health. Our friends with the sticks followed triumphantly, even though a few of them had taken some hard knocks, too. The one who’d spoken to me earlier looked over at us, producing huge frosty clouds as he breathed hard.

“I may hate coons,” he said with a grin. “But, damnation, I do hate cops more!”

“That,” Cyrus murmured, “was what they were saying.”

I looked at the thugs on the ground. “Cops?” I said to the man by the stoop.

“Ex-cops,” he answered, walking toward me. “Used to be roundsmen in this neighborhood. They’ve got a hell of a nerve, coming back to a building like this.” I nodded, looking at the unconscious bodies on the sidewalk before me, and then signaled thanks to the man. “Your honor,” he said, indicating his mouth, “that was thirsty work.” I pulled out some coins and threw them to him. He tried but failed to catch the money, at which his mates fell grabbing to the ground. They were soon at each other’s throats. Sara and I got into the calash, and in a few minutes Cyrus had us on Broadway, heading uptown.

Sara was full of good cheer, now that we were safe, and she fairly leapt around the carriage, recalling each dangerous moment of our expedition rapturously. I smiled and nodded, glad that she’d been able to have a moment of positive action; but my mind was on something else. I was going over what Mrs. Santorelli had said, and trying to examine it as Kreizler would have. There was something in the tale of young Giorgio that reminded me of Laszlo’s account of the children in the water tower; something very important, though I couldn’t quite put my finger—and then I had it. The behavior. Kreizler had described two troublesome children, embarrassments to their family—and I had just been told about another such youth. All three, in Kreizler’s hypothesis, had met their ends at the hands of the same man. Was this apparent similarity of character a factor in their deaths, or simply a coincidence? It might have been the latter. But somehow I didn’t think Kreizler would find it so…

Lost in these thoughts, I didn’t quite hear Sara asking me a rather stunning question; but when she repeated it, the outlandishness of the notion became clear even to my distracted mind. We’d been through a great deal, however, that day, and I could not find it in me to disappoint her.

CHAPTER 9

I got to Kreizler’s house, at 283 East Seventeenth Street, a few minutes early, white-tied and caped and not at all sure of the conspiracy I’d entered into with Sara—a conspiracy that for better or worse would now play out. The snow had deepened to several inches, forming a quiet, pleasant layer over the bare shrubs and iron fences of Stuyvesant Park, across the street from Laszlo’s house. Opening the small gate to his similarly small front yard, I walked to the door and gently rapped the brass knocker. The French windows of the parlor, one story up, were slightly ajar, and I could hear Cyrus at the piano, giving forth with “Pari siamo” from Rigoletto—Kreizler was warming his ears up for the evening.

The door opened, bringing me face-to-face with the skittish, uniformed figure of Mary Palmer, Laszlo’s maid and housekeeper. Mary rounded out the list of former patients who had entered Kreizler’s service, and she was yet another who made the visitor who knew her full story a bit uneasy. Beautifully built, with a bewitching face and sky-blue eyes, Mary had been considered idiotic by her family since birth. She could not speak coherently, putting words and syllables together in unintelligible jumbles, and so was never taught to read or write. Her mother and father, the latter a respected schoolmaster in Brooklyn, had trained her to perform menial household functions, and seemed to care for her adequately; but one day in 1884, when she was seventeen, Mary chained her father to his brass bed while the rest of the family was out, and then set fire to the house. The father died a horrible death; and since there was no apparent reason for the attack, Mary was involuntarily committed to the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwells Island.

There she was discovered by Kreizler, who occasionally did consulting work on the island where he had found his first employment. Laszlo was struck by the fact that Mary lacked most, if not all, of the symptoms of dementia praecox, the only condition that, in his opinion, constituted true insanity. (The term is currently being supplanted, Laszlo says quite rightly, by Dr. Eugene Bleuler’s label “schizophrenia”; as I understand it, the word denotes a pathological inability to either recognize or interact with the reality around one.) Kreizler began to try to communicate with the girl, and soon discovered that in fact she suffered from classic motor aphasia, complicated by agraphia: she could understand words and think in clear sentences, but those parts of her mind that controlled speech and writing were badly damaged. Like most such unfortunates, Mary was bitterly aware of her difficulty, but lacked the ability to explain it (or anything else) to others. Kreizler was able to communicate by asking questions that Mary could answer with the simplest of statements—often just “yes” or “no”—and he taught her as much of rudimentary writing as her condition would permit. Weeks of work brought him to a new and shocking understanding of her history: apparently, her own father had been sexually violating her for years before the killing, but she, of course, had been unable to relate this fact to anyone.

Kreizler had demanded a legal review of the case, and Mary was eventually freed. Afterwards, she managed to convey to Laszlo the idea that she would make an ideal house servant. Knowing that the girl’s chances of an independent life were otherwise slim, Kreizler had taken her on, and now she not only maintained but jealously guarded his home. The effect of her presence, combined with those of Cyrus Montrose and Stevie Taggert, was to temper my mood whenever I visited that elegant house on Seventeenth Street. Despite the place’s collection of contemporary and classic art and splendid French furniture, as well as the grand piano out of which Cyrus perpetually coaxed fine music, I had never been able when there to fully elude the awareness that I was surrounded by thieves and killers, each of whom had a very good explanation for his or her acts but none of whom gave the impression of being willing to put up with questionable behavior from anyone else ever again.

“Hello, Mary,” I said, handling her my cape. She gave me a small dip on one knee in reply, looking at the floor. “I’m early. Is Dr. Kreizler dressed?”

“No, sir,” she said with deliberate effort. Her face filled with the simultaneous relief and frustration that were characteristic when her words came out correctly: relief at having succeeded, frustration at not being able to say more. She opened an arm sheathed in billowy blue linen toward the stairs, and then moved to hang my cape on a nearby rack.

“Well, then, I guess I’ll have a drink and enjoy Cyrus’s exceptional singing,” I said.

I took the stairs two at a time, feeling a bit confined in my evening clothes, then entered the parlor. Cyrus nodded to me and kept singing, while I anxiously fetched a silver cigarette box off the marble mantel over the very warm fireplace. Removing one of the tasty blends of Virginia and Russian black tobacco, I drew a match from a smaller silver case on the mantel and lit it.

Kreizler came trotting down the stairs from above, in a set of white tie and tails that were impeccably cut. “No sign of Roosevelt’s man?” he said, just as Mary appeared with a silver tray. On it were four ounces of sevruga caviar, some thin slices of toast, a bottle of ice-cold vodka, and several small, frosted glasses: a thoroughly admirable habit Kreizler had picked up during a trip to St. Petersburg.

“None,” I answered, stubbing out my cigarette and eagerly attacking the tray.

“Well, I’ll want punctuality from everyone involved,” he pronounced, checking the time. “And if he doesn’t…”

At that the door knocker downstairs clicked several times, and the sounds of entrance filtered up the stairs. Kreizler nodded. “That, at least, is a good sign. Cyrus—something a little less grim, I think. ‘Di provenza il mar.’”

Cyrus followed the instruction, launching softly into the gentle Verdi tune. I swallowed my caviar in an anxious gulp, and then Mary entered again. Her aspect was somewhat uncertain, even mildly agitated, and she tried but failed to announce our guest. As she hustled away to the back of the house with another small bend of her